1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates to: an image processing method and an image processing apparatus in which it is determined whether an obtained document image is similar to a reference image stored in advance, and then on the basis of the determination result, the document image is clarified; an image reading apparatus and an image forming apparatus employing the image processing apparatus; and a recording medium that carries a computer program for implementing the image processing apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
A technique is known in which a document composed of a plurality of pages is partitioned at desired pages so that the document is classified, and then the page images of individual classified documents are filed separately. In an exemplary method, partition sheets having an identification mark are inserted at breaks of the document in advance. Then, when an identification mark recorded on a partition sheet is detected among the page images obtained by reading the document through an image reading apparatus such as a scanner, the document is partitioned. In another exemplary method, when a document is to be read by an image reading apparatus, the numbers of pages for partitioning a document are specified in advance. Then, when the document of a specified number of pages is read, the document is partitioned.
Further, in order that filing processing for page images obtained by reading a document should be achieved in a short time, an image filing apparatus is proposed in which: page images of a plurality of sub-documents are read successively and stored; then, index information is generated for referring to each of the page images; then, index information for each page is stored in a manner partitioned for each sub-document, on the basis of the specified number of pages for one sub-document; so that without the necessity of performing filing processing on page images at each time when page images for one sub-document have been read, filing processing is performed document by document on the page images of a plurality of sub-documents (e.g., see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H8-7071)
Nevertheless, in the method that partition sheets are inserted into a document like in prior art or the apparatus described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H8-7071, at each time of scan processing for a document, partition sheets need be inserted at desired positions of the document before the scan. Further, the partition sheets need be searched and removed from the document after the scan. Further, in the method that the number of pages of one sub-document is specified in advance, the kind of the number of pages that is allowed to be specified is restricted to one. Thus, documents can merely be partitioned using always the same number of pages. This has caused a problem that filing processing for page images is not achieved for a document in which the number of pages for each sub-document differs from each other. Further, for the purpose of processing of a document in which the number of pages for each sub-document differs from each other, a description file that defines the number of pages of each of a plurality of sub-documents need be generated. Then, the generated description file need be read in advance. This has caused a problem that when there are a large number of kinds in the numbers of pages constituting the document, the work of generating the description file is complicated.